When is negative emotion positive for relationships? An investigation of married couples and roommates

Abstract

Abstract Three types of negative emotion (hard, soft, and fear based) were believed to be integral to functioning in close interpersonal relationships. Hard emotion includes feeling angry, soft emotion includes feeling sad or hurt, and fear‐based emotion includes feeling anxious or threatened. Married persons (studies 1 and 3) and college roommates (study 2) rated the extent to which they would feel different emotions in response to a variety of negative partner behaviors. Confirmatory Factor Analysis supported the distinction between the three types of emotion. Although hard and soft negative emotions were highly positively correlated, they had opposite effects when used to predict relationship functioning. After controlling for shared variance between the emotions, soft emotion was associated with positive relationship functioning (high satisfaction, low conflict, and low avoidance) and hard emotion was associated with negative relationship functioning (low satisfaction, high conflict, and high avoidance). In contrast, fear‐based emotion was strongly, positively, and uniquely associated with relationship anxiety.

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